woman (“Ballada, v kotoroi opisyvaetsia, kak odna starushka ekhala na
chernom kone vdvoem, i kto sidel vperedi,” 1814 )—a translation of
Robert Southey’s “Old Woman of Berkeley: A Ballad: Shewing how an
old woman rode double and who rode before her” ( 1799 )—tells of an evil
witch whom the devil drags down to hell. The next generation of men
poets in their ballad/romances not only, like Zhukovsky, depicted
women as victims of male violence but also as gratuitously false and
evil. Neither image was very useful for those women poets who wished
to tell women’s stories.^35
Nonetheless, Russian women poets seem to have experienced some-what less genre anxiety in relation to the ballad than to the poema,per-
haps because they had greater access to the sources of the ballad. While
few of these women writers knew Greek and Latin, many of them knew
German, French, and even English, which allowed them to read Euro-
pean folk and literary ballads in the original.^36 In any case, Russian
women poets seem to have felt freer to experiment with the genre, in or-
der to make it fit their needs.
Interestingly, it was a woman, Anna Turchaninova, who wrote thefirst ballads published in Russia, “Pesenka ob Leonarde i Blondine”
(see appendix) and “Villiam i Margarita” (both 1799–1800). “Leonard
i Blondina,” an original ballad set in Spain, tells of a woman whose
beloved dies in the bullring. While the story seems conventional
enough, we note that Blondina serves neither as the primary victim of
the story nor as the capricious cause of the hero’s death. It is Leonard’s
father who demands that Leonard fight the bull to prove his manhood
to Blondina. When Blondina protests that she does not want her fiancé
to risk his life in such a demonstration, Leonard’s father tells her she is
not fit to be the mother of his future grandsons. Leonard fights the bull,
which fatally gores him and Blondina, who runs to his aid. The lovers
are reunited as ghosts. The ballad could be seen as a comment on the
cult of machismo in Spain and elsewhere.
The second ballad, “Villiam i Margarita,” is a Russian translation ofthe German translation of an English reworking of two ballads from
Percy’s Reliques.It tells of a man who sees the ghost of the woman he has
betrayed and the next day dies on her grave. This theme of a woman tak-
ing postmortem revenge on a faithless lover also appears in Lisitsyna’s
“Byl’“ (True story, 1829 ), her “Romans” (“Sir Artur byl khrabroi voin”
[Sir Arthur was a brave warrior], 1829 ), and Rostopchina’s “Revnost’ za
grobom” (Jealousy beyond the grave, 1852 ). This recurring theme may
72 Gender and Genre